1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to requirements management.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Requirements management is an essential task of product development, since it assures that a developed product fulfills the expectations of the customer. Requirements traceability, i.e., the ability to “follow the life of a requirement in both a forward and a backwards direction”, as stated in O. Gotel, and A. Finkelstein, An Analysis of the Requirements Traceability Problem, 1st International Conference on Requirements Engineering, 1994 pp. 94-101, is an important part of requirements management and provides critical support for developing and maintaining products. Traceability supports analysis in numerous engineering activities such as change analysis, requirements validation, and software code verification.
Requirements traceability is supported by modern requirements managements tools such as (IBM RATIONAL REQUISITEPRO software, 2007, Telelogic DOORS software, 2007, and Borland CALIBER software, 2007. These tools provide the means for developers to specify trace relationships between requirements. Requirements are typically captured in textual form and stored in a requirements repository along with tracing information. These tools provide various views into the repository which allow users to report on and modify the requirements and the traces. These views are only available online to licensed users of the tool; however, it is possible to export the contents of these views into a text document or spreadsheet.
As a result, two different views are used for manipulating requirements and tracing information. One view shows the detailed description of requirements (see e.g., FIG. 1), while another view shows traceability links between identifiers of the requirements (such as names or unique IDs) (see e.g., FIGS. 2A and 2B). While this separation of concerns may be beneficial (for example, one person can do the tracing while another person adds descriptive text to the requirements), in some situations it could be preferable to show and edit requirements details and traceability information in a single view. For instance, if the traceability information could be combined with the detailed requirements information, then a review of the information could be more effective, since both, the requirements and the traces, could be reviewed simultaneously.